A UW research team recently received a $1.77 million NSF grant to investigate new
membrane materials for purification and desalinization of water. Team members, from
left, are Jonathan Brant, a professor of civil and architectural engineering; John
Hoberg, a professor of chemistry; Laura de Sousa Oliveira, an assistant professor
of chemistry; and Bruce Parkinson, a School of Energy Resources professor of chemistry.
(Emily Fretland Photo)
The global disruption produced by climate change will place further stress on the
world’s freshwater supplies due to higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns
and increases in human population, according to John Hoberg. This is expected to result
in half of the world’s population facing freshwater shortages by 2030.
A research team at the University of Wyoming received a National Science Foundation
(NSF) grant to investigate new membrane materials for purification and desalinization
of water. The four-year research grant award, in the amount of nearly $1.77 million,
is for a project titled “Salt Separation Membranes Based on Modifiable Two-Dimensional
Covalent Organic Frameworks.” The grant begins Oct. 1 and continues through Sept.
30, 2025.
The research group is composed of Hoberg, a professor in UW’s Department of Chemistry; Bruce Parkinson, a UW School of Energy Resources professor of chemistry; Laura de Sousa Oliveira, a UW assistant professor of chemistry;
Jonathan Brant, a professor in the UW Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering; and Zachary Gray, co-founder of WYONANO LLC, a company based in Sheridan.
“Since only about 3 percent of all water on Earth is suitable for human consumption
and the oceans contain 97 percent of the Earth’s water, energy-efficient desalinization,
or salt-separation technologies, is crucial for maintaining society’s quality of life,”
Hoberg says. “Reverse osmosis is currently the most employed and reliable method for
water desalinization. However, improvements in process efficiency are needed to make
it a more sustainable treatment option.”
The improvements Hoberg mentions center on the physical and chemical characteristics
of the membranes themselves to address issues related to salt selectivity, water permeability
and chemical tolerance. The project’s researchers are working to produce new generations
of membrane materials that are more stable, selective and energy efficient than current
reverse osmosis membranes. These membrane materials can be modified for other water
purification applications, such as the removal of specific contaminants.
“The new membrane materials will be based on two-dimensional, covalent organic frameworks
-- 2D polymers with a defined but modifiable pore structure that can be synthesized
with a high degree of order,” Hoberg explains. “Furthermore, the project researchers
have developed synthetic strategies for putting a wide variety of functional groups
in the pores. The 2D flake-like nature of the materials makes them naturally suited
for semipermeable membrane applications.”
The project’s focus will be on putting charged functional groups in the pores and
changing the pore sizes to make ion-selective membranes that reject either anions
or cations with a specific size threshold initially focusing on desalinization. Anions
are atoms with a negative charge, while cations are atoms that bear a positive electric
charge.
To guide the synthesis of the new membrane materials and optimize their performance
for a particular separation, the team will use a feedback loop between the organic
synthesis of the membrane, membrane performance testing, and computational modeling
and machine learning.
Hoberg says the research aligns with the goals of the NSF’s Designing Materials to
Revolutionize and Engineer Our Future Materials Genome Initiative to accelerate materials
discovery and development by building the fundamental knowledge base needed to advance
the design and development of materials with desirable properties and functionality.
This research would likely not have gotten off the ground without initial seed funding
of $200,000 provided by SER three years ago, Hoberg says. The seed funding led to
the project receiving $3 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy, a Small
Business Technology Transfer grant through WYONANO, and now NSF.
